Hacker News Reader

Comment by psd1 | Hacker News Reader

GMT is a time zone used in Britain. It is no more special than any other. The standard is UTC.

If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones. Brits would get up at 08:00, Indians at 04:00, and Americans at 12:00/13:00/14:00 depending on location. Shops would set their opening hours relative to local sunrise. It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people, and that franchise locations have differing hours of business, and that fuckwits telephone you when you're trying to sleep.

View on HN

People's eyes glaze over when I rant about this. But yes, I fantasize about a world where you could say "let's set up a video call at 6" and there's no mental math when there's geographic distance involved.

Biggest downside I can think of, apart from the entire population groaning about making the switch, would be the confusion from reading literature from the before times. Oh, and all blood, sweat, and tears of all the devs who created timezone code going down the drain.

Some industries do this using UTC. For example flight departure and arrival times are in UTC on all paperwork. And also the meteo reports and forecasts, and airspace restrictions, and airport opening times etc.

Mostly out of a necessity that fights tend to cross timezones and planes come and go from all over the world and they don't want to have to figure out everywhere what the local time is.

Really only passenger info screens convert to local time.

Swatch tried unsuccessfully to sell people on this idea back in the late 90s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

The biggest downside would be the date rolling over during a record-keeping period. But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.

> But this is already a problem and people handle it just fine. I mean, we say "tonight" for 02:30 on the following day, so meh.

Because that only affects the comparatively small number of people awake respectively events happening at that time of day. If you move the calendar date change right into the middle of the waking hours of almost everybody else, things get quite a bit more annoying.

I'm willing to make that sacrifice if we can delete python's time zone library.

No no no. We can't make the world adjust to our crappy code.

24:00 is "mid night". 02:30 is not less 'tonight' than 21:30, assuming no DST.

This is how it works in China. China has one time zone, so if you are in Xinjiang, you just go to work/school a bit later than if you are in Shanghai.

I am extremely glad engineers are not in charge. Only an engineer (with a teeny-tiny dash of mid to high levels of egoism because of presumably how smart he thinks he is; the keyword being "thinks") thinks of humans as nothing else except extremely mechanical machines

> If engineers were in charge, there would be no time zones

We might not specifically have time zones, but we'd have something that is equivalent.

We live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us.

That puts a lower limit on the complexity of our time keeping system.

Instead of time zones, we'd have variable customary times for meals. I call that a reduction in complexity.

You are just moving the complexity from your date widget to the user, who in the end probably is better of using a sun dial.

Only engineers that haven't thought this idea through: https://qntm.org/abolish

Fortunately they're not in charge.

> It's already the case that work-shifts span calendar days for many people

They're still only a small minority a people, though. (In Germany for example ~5 % of people regularly work night shifts.)

Without timezones, in locations further away from the meridian a far larger number of people will suddenly be impacted. Having the calendar day change smack in the middle of waking hours of most people is rather annoying.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com